[Distutils] Alternate static metadata PEP submission...

[David Cournapeau]

Fred Drake wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 11:26 PM, David Cournapeau
> <david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp> wrote:
>   
>> You can't ban setup.py: although a lot of packages can rely on a purely
>> declarative package description, some package won't be able to do so
>> (unless your declarative thing ends up being a full language).
>>     
>
> Given the variety of special cases that have to be dealt with, we'll
> always have to a way to build packages that use Python code for what
> we're currently using setup.py for.
>
> For the many packages that don't need that level of flexibility, using
> a tool that consumes static metadata is a major win, so long as we
> keep in mind that tools need to be able to determine when that static
> metadata is sufficient.  That allows the development of tools that can
> usefully get things done *and* refuse to run untrusted code
> themselves.
>   

Maybe my English was lacking in my previous email, but that just
described one of the main goal of something like toydist: fully describe
in a declarative manner a large subset of python 'packages', and making
it possible to interoperate/extend with other tools (for now, only
distutils itself in toydist toy implementation, but I am more interested
in interoperating with waf/scons in the short term, and other people
would be more interested in buildout, paver, etc... depending on their
needs).

David